In modern day digital cameras, the viewing of the scene that will be captured is accomplished with either an optical viewfinder or a liquid crystal display (LCD) unit either alone or in combination with an optical viewfinder. In most, if not in all digital cameras, the intensity level or brightness level of the LCD is manually adjustable to accomodate for standard photographic lighting conditions. That is a middle of the road approach is taken to accomodate for both indoor and outdoor lighting conditions.
Besides the viewing of a scene with the LCD, the LCD also accomplishes two other primary purposes by displaying menu selections for enabling the user to control or set up camera operating conditions, and to display camera status information whenever a user is ready to capture an object image or has in fact captured an object image. While the LCD is able to perform these various function in general lighting conditions, all too often due to overly bright or dim ambient light conditions, the image displayed on the LCD is either too bright or too dim thereby greatly hindering a user in properly operarting the camera.
One attempt at solving this problem has been to provide an over-riding manual adjustment to control the backlighting of the LCD. While this approach is satisfactory in some lighting conditions, the solution has not been entirely satisfactory. In this regard, the control selection for over-riding the default backlighting condition is generally found in a buried camera menu item that must be display on the LCD. Since the menu selection item must be displayed to be selected, often times it is difficult or entirely impossible to display the menu item so that it may be clearly viewed by a user due to the ambient lighting conditions.
Therefore it would be highly desirable to have a new and improved digital camera that includes an LCD that operates in a variety of photographic lighting conditions ranging from poorly illuminated indoor settings to brightly illuminated outdoor settings.